Role of Municipal Steering in Sustainable Building and Refurbishment

The objective of the research was to assess the roles of municipal building authorities and their potential to act when a rapid change is needed towards energy-efficient and sustainable building and refurbishment. Our premise was that local authorities will have an essential role in improving the awareness and commitment of stakeholders and in supporting them to understand potentials of sustainable building. However, this may require the development of current roles. According to the results, consultation and negotiating steering is useful and needed especially towards non-professional builders. Change to consulting steering requires changes in building control processes. The strengths of guidance by building control authorities would be neutrality, good coverage (all builders must anyway be involved with building control), personal contacts, and responding to acute need of the client. To increase the consulting role of the building control authorities, more resources are needed. Establishment of electronic services in building control is believed to be a means to release resources from routine work for guidance.Municipal actors are also showing increasing interest in preparing city-level sustainability strategies. The municipal strategies should be closely linked to the local administration to ensure the realization of the strategy and also the allocation of adequate resources.